NBA: Lots of Rumors, No Big Deals (So Far)

A lot can happen on deadline day, as the NBA’s rumor mill either culminates in something truly game-changing—such as when the Detroit Pistons traded for Rasheed Wallace and ended up winning the 2004 championship—or nothing much at all. This year, the needle is pushing closer toward the sleepy side. Building up to Thursday’s 3 p.m. ET deadline, the biggest deal thus far has been a sum of parts swapped between the Houston Rockets, Phoenix Suns and Sacramento Kings for various reasons, most of them money-related. The Rockets, while attempting to save cap space for the offseason, got back potentially promising rookie Thomas Robinson, the former Kansas standout. The Suns paired up Marcus Morris with his twin brother Markieff, because when you have the worst record in the Western Conference it’s important to have a little fun. The Kings did something very Kings-ian, shedding salary in anticipation of a franchise move to Seattle by giving away a player they took with a top-five draft pick less than a year ago. Why, you ask? “These are the Sacramento Kings owners,” Yahoo’s Kelly Dwyer laments. “They frost their tips, they fail at business, and they dislike Sacramento Kings fans.”

That’s about it, though of course something could change by the afternoon. The Boston Celtics, who David Roth covered in yesterday’s Fix, are probably keeping the remaining parts of their aging Big 3. Atlanta’s Josh Smith, the not-quite-a-max-but-still-very-good player, continues to be inquired over by any team interested in an athletically singular forward charitably referred to as LeBron Lite, which is most of them. New Orleans’s Eric Gordon, once the league’s premier young shooting guard before being hampered with a slate of surreptitiously problematic injuries, is unlikely to go due to his bulky contract (just signed in the previous offseason, it’s fun to note). J.J. Redick, always a reliable name bandied about in trade rumors, made no closed secret about his apathy over possibly leaving the Orlando Magic—though no one escapes a lottery team quite so easily. Most of the other parts in play, though, are fairly small potatoes, unless you consider Fab Melo a worthy part of the NBA’s hot stove action.

Still, there’s a reason for all the rumor-mongering beyond the typical dance of any trade deadline. A clause in the most recent collective bargaining agreement signed during the lockout will soon something called the “repeater tax,” which raises the luxury tax rate for teams who’ve paid the tax in three of the previous four seasons. It won’t take effect into the 2014-15 season, but it’ll include this current season under its umbrella of qualifying years—which means teams who are close to the line have been especially active in trying to move things around, even if that’s meant entertaining the swapping of a future Hall of Famer for scrap metal.

In demonstrating the clause’s punitive effect, SB Nation’s Tom Ziller theorizes a situation in which the Los Angeles Lakers found themselves $20 million over the cap with a $95 million roster. “If they were not repeater, their total tax payment would be $45 million, and their total payroll would be $140 million,” he writes. “If they were a repeater, their total tax payment would be $65 million, and their total payroll would be $160 million. That’s why teams want to avoid the repeater tag.” Simple enough, though there’s still a few hours left to see if the threat of a higher bill is enough to force any team’s hand on a real roster dump.

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